Deeplinks Blog posts about No Downtime for Free Speech

An enterprising YouTube user has completed a fascinating set of tests to figure out how sensitive the audio fingerprinting tools are in YouTube's Content ID system. (This is the system being used by Warner Music Group to do wholesale censorship of music, including clear fair uses, on YouTube.) After uploading 82 videos that include altered versions of The Waitresses' hit, "I Know What Boys Like," the experimenter comes up with a number of interesting conclusions:

Can a noncommercial critical website use the trademark of the entity it critiques in its domain name? Surprisingly, it appears that the usually open-minded folks at Wikipedia think not.

Last February, a pair of artists, working with several collaborators, created a Wikipedia article and invited the general public to add to it, following Wikipedia’s standards of credibility and verifiability. The work was intended to comment on the nature of art and Wikipedia. But Wikipedia editors did not take kindly to the project, and it was shut down within fifteen hours for being insufficiently “encyclopaedic.”

Fast forward a couple of months. The artists, Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, have created a noncommercial website that documents the project, called Wikipedia Art. The domain name for the project: wikipediaart.org.

First they came for the teenagers. Could toddlers be far behind? Nope. Thanks to the good folks at YouTomb, we’ve learned that Warner Music’s automated takedown net has now caught two videos of little kids being little kids.

We've brought you severalposts explaining Warner's unfortunate crusade to censor its music from YouTube videos, even when those activities would clearly qualify as fair use. Here's a concrete example: a YouTube creator that goes by the moniker Dust Films has pioneered a new parody video genre, the "literal video." The idea is to change the lyrics to famous music videos to describe what is actually going on in the video itself. The results are hilarious.